Acknowledgments

My thanks to the following institutions for their generosity and hospitality: Bard College, especially Leon Botstein, Mary Caponegro, Wout Cornelissen, Benjamin Hale, Robert Kelly, Grayson Morley, Micaela Morrissette, Bradford Morrow, Francine Prose, Raissa St. Pierre, and Irene Zedlacher; the Copernicus Society of America; the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, especially Connie Brothers, Kelly Smith, Deb West, and Jan Zenisek; the MacDowell Colony; the Truman Capote Literary Trust, especially Louise Schwartz; the University of Iowa English Department, especially Brooks Landon and Robyn Schiff; and the Corporation of Yaddo, especially Elaina Richardson and Candace Wait.

Thank you to Roni Lubliner and Peer Ebbighausen at NBCUniversal, and to Leland Faust at the Alfred J. Hitchcock Trust, for permission and assistance in reproducing images from Hitchcock’s films.

Thanks as well to the following readers for their insight and support: Jin Auh, Andrés Carlstein, Bryan Castille, Daniel Castro, Adam Eaglin, E.J. Fischer, Angela Flournoy, Jessica Friedman, Meg Gauley, Susan Hazen-Hammond, Arna Hemenway, Brigid Hughes, Evan Michael James, T. Geronimo Johnson, Cheston Knapp, Aaron Kunin, Travis Kurowski, David Leavitt, Carmen Maria Machado, Kannan Mahadevan, Halimah Marcus, Erica Martz, Ayana Mathis, Mark Mayer, Eric Obenauf, Amy Parker, Michael Ray, Marilynne Robinson, Rebecca Rukeyser, Jennifer Sahn, Pat Sims, Harry Stecopoulos, Wells Tower, Tony Tulathimutte, Madhuri Vijay, Adrian Van Young, and Eliza Jane Wood. Special thanks to Sam Chang and Ben Mauk.

‘White Dialogues’ quotes or paraphrases several works of film theory. The ‘Rear Window Vertigo’ reading is Jalal Toufic’s, from his essay ‘Rear Window Vertigo,’ included in Two or Three Things I’m Dying To Tell You. The phrase (and the concept of) ‘the mummy complex’ is André Bazin’s, from his essay ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’ included in What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. The formulation ‘she is dead, and she is going to die’ (as well as some of the surrounding language in that passage) is Roland Barthes’s, from Camera Lucida. The Michel Chion quotation is a combination of two separate passages, both from The Voice in Cinema.

The phrase (and the concept of) ‘radical closure’ is Jalal Toufic’s.